In lamenting the exile of Judah after the destruction of the First Temple and how the Jews were subsequently harried by the nations of the world, the Book of Lamentations states: “all those who chased after her [the Kingdom of Judah] reached her between the mitzarim” ( Lam. 1:3). Rashi follows the Midrash (Eichah Rabbah §1:29) in explaining that “between the mitzarim” refers to the three-week period bookended by the tragedies of the Seventeenth of Tammuz and the Ninth of Av. This is why those three weeks are often called bein ha’mitzarim. In this explanation, Rashi interprets the word mitzarim as a cognate of tzarah (“sorrow,” “suffering”). But Rashi also offers another, contextual-literal interpretation that explains bein ha’mitzarim as referring to “between the boundaries,” meaning that the Jews were trapped by their enemies in situations from which they could not escape — as though they were stuck between two fences. To illustrate this point, Rashi uses the word gevul (“border”), while Targum and Mahari Kara (there) use the similar word techum to say the same thing. In this essay, we discuss the four words mitzarim, gevul, techum, and s’far all of which seem to be synonyms that mean “border.”

Rabbi Yehuda Ibn Kuraish (a ninth century Spanish grammarian) in his Risala clarifies that mitzarim should be understood as the plural form of the word meitzar (“border”) found in rabbinic literature. For example, this usage appears in Rabbinic Aramaic in the legal term dina d’bar mitzra (Ketubot 44a), whereby one who sells a field is legally obligated to offer to sell it first to the field’s neighbor before anybody else. Ibn Kuraish further notes that this word meitzar is not related to the Biblical Hebrew term meitzar — famously used in the passage, “From the straits [meitzar] I call out [to] Hashem” ( Ps. 118:5) — as that word relates to tzar (“narrowness”) and denotes something slightly different.

That said, it should be noted that some commentators (like Ibn Ezra to Lam. 1:3 and Rabbi Shlomo Pappenheim in Cheshek Shlomo) do actually connect mitzarim to the Biblical meitzar. We could explain that connection by realizing that a “border” essentially serves to narrow down the contours and boundaries of a given plot of land, so there is definitely a thematic connection between the two words.

With this in mind, we can think about the name Mitzrayim given to Ham’s second son ( Gen. 10:6, I Chron. 1:8), who was the progenitor of the Egyptians. Rabbi Avraham Yitzchok Shain in Birkat Ish theorizes that Ham tried with all his might to make sure that there will be no in-fighting amongst his sons as there was between himself and his own brothers (as well as between Cain and Abel). To that end, he took pains to clearly delineate the borders between the territory of his eldest son Cush and his second Mitzrayim. This focus on “borders” is reflected in the very name Mitzrayim, as it was only when he was born that Ham felt the need to spell out Cush’s territorial boundaries very clearly. [For more about the word Mitzrayim in reference to Egypt, see “Escape for Patros” (April 2023).]

It is interesting to note that Rabbi Pinchas of Koretz explains that there is no Zohar on the three parshiyot always read during the bein ha’mitzarim period (Matot, Masei, and Devarim) because during those three weeks, our minds are “constricted” and “minimized” by mourning all the tragedies that we have suffered. In such a “narrow-minded” state of being, it is inappropriate to study the esoteric secrets of the Torah, so the Zohar did not comment on those pericopes.

When Hashem tells Moses to command the Jewish People about the borders of the Holy Land........

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